RSS as Personal Newspaper

Over at Citation Needed, Molly White has a nice piece on how you can Curate your own newspaper with RSS. If you’re not reading Molly’s work already, you really should, especially if you care about what’s happening in the tech sector (mostly a mix of web3/crypto, and tech’s impacts on human rights and freedoms).

The basic gist is that RSS is a tried and true protocol that tons of services already have running but don’t do a great job of advertising, and it lets you read things at your pace, in an easily digestible, consistent format. I’ve been saying similar for ages, but I think she makes a more compelling argument for it, not the least of which being that it’s a lynchpin in how she gets her job done.

What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper? It could include independent journalists, bloggers, mainstream media, worker-owned media collectives, and just about anyone else who publishes online. Even podcast episodes, videos from your favorite YouTube channels, and online forum posts could slot in, too. Only the stuff you want to see, all in one place, ready to read at your convenience. No email notifications interrupting your peace (unless you want them), no pressure to read articles immediately. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Molly White

I initially saw this article as a link in Blue Sky… but when I actually had a chance to read it, it was in my RSS reader.

Earworms for July

I was thinking about icon opening theme songs from shows, but that would be easy to make significantly longer than just a ten-ish song set. So I decided to make it ten songs from animated shows. The goal here isn’t just kinda catchy stuff, the goal is the sorts of openings that you find yourself not skipping the opening if you’re watching it on DVD or a streaming service (or at least not as often, let’s be real).

So, in no particular order:

Playlist:

There are a ton of others out there, even just sticking within the “animated” theme. Are there any you’d add?

Welcome to July?

Just got back from a week in Bristol (UK) for work. Nice time, good folks. I sincerely like my coworkers, and I love to travel, so it feels more like an opportunity than a task when these work trips come up. That said, one of these days I need to allocate some time off around the trip, so I can go see more of the country and say hi to various folks I know.

I was back at work for a week (three days, really), and now I’m on vacation at Squam, as is our annual tradition. It’s been humid and keeps threatening to rain, but the temperatures have been nice, and it’s nice to disconnect for a little bit. I find myself, more often than not, still stuck in work brain at the end of the day (and the days where that’s not the case, it’s because I’m wiped and my brain is mush), so it’s nice to have some dedicated time off to reset.

I’ve got a small handful of projects I want to work on while I’m on vacation, but frankly if I just manage to swim every day, I’ll consider it a win. Happy July, y’all.

Some Photos behind the Cut

RSS Rants

I’ve got a lot of RSS feeds in my feed reader. Some are dead feeds, some are prolific. If I don’t keep up, after about a week, I’ll come back to around 700 articles waiting.

The thing is, a lot of those articles are bad. Here’s why:

  1. RSS getting treated like a notification system. If all your RSS feed does is post a one-liner saying you’ve got an article up, you’re wasting my time and missing the point. It’s another delivery channel for your content. You wouldn’t sign up people for a newsletter where you just send a message saying “I’ve got a new post up. Go read it.” The same should apply to your RSS feed.
  2. RSS getting treated like an afterthought. Cool, you added some neat integration with some external service! Did you look to see what happens to those posts in your RSS feed? A lot of the time it’s literally a blank post. Other times it’s malformed junk missing any context of what’s supposed to be there.
  3. RSS getting misconfigured. There’s a lot of implementations of RSS feeds for different static site generators and blogging engines and CMS’s out there, but a lot of them feel like they were implemented so they could add “RSS support” to their checklist. As a result, you get blogs where every time they make a new post, every single post on their site gets marked as updated in RSS. In most of the cases I’ve bothered checking, basically the lastBuildDate is getting populated with the last date the site was built, rather than the last date that specific content was updated.

I keep hoping some of these folks will fix their systems and approaches, but I think I’m going to have to do a cull sometime soon. Depending on your RSS reader, some of this may be more noticeable than others, but for me, I’ve had enough.

Earworms for June

On a bit of a 90s kick here. There was this whole period in the mid-90s that had an explosion of music that just hit this sort of zeitgeist, where even the songs that musically differed still had this particular DNA that you can absolutely see in hindsight. And frankly, some of the songs still feel relevant today, musically and lyrically. Anyway, hope you enjoy. (Trying to keep these to 10-12 songs – there were a lot of songs I thought about adding but opted not to.)

Playlist:

Got any favorites from that era that you’d add?

Sleep Phases

Hank over on vlogbrothers has a quick little video talking about what is arguably a disorder, but only because society doesn’t support it particularly well: having a different sleep pattern than most people.

My natural sleep cycle is the same as his: when left to my own devices, I always tended towards being up til 2 or 3am, and waking up closer to 10am. Of course, for the past several years I’ve had a dog that thinks whenever it gets light out is the right time to wake up, and a job that (when I was living on the west coast) trended towards early morning meetings (to accommodate folks in Europe… and because we just had a lot of morning people on the team). I will say, it’s been a lot easier to wrangle the meetings since moving three time zones eastward.

I’m mostly adjusted to my current cycle (which puts me to bed around midnight and up around 7-7:30), but I still find it pretty easy to start slipping towards 1 or 2am, especially if I’m taken out of my routine for things like vacation. I suspect I’ll still be on this cycle for quite some time, since even if I won the lottery and didn’t need to worry about work schedules, Cecil is still a morning puppy (and Mabel has picked up his habit). And that’s (mostly) fine. But I do sometimes miss the way my brain felt when I was able to be on my natural sleep cycle instead – I feel like I was more relaxed, more at ease, and had more spoons for things.

First Creemee of the Summer

It’s been a chilly spring – a few warm spells here and there, but the back half of May basically didn’t break 50 and was raining more often than not. Even Memorial Day weekend was pretty wet and cool. So yesterday, when it finally climbed into the 70s and got sunny? A delight. The ice cream stand down the street is now open for the season, so what better way to inaugurate the summer with a creemee?

Yes, I’m spelling that right. It’s a Vermonter thing – think soft serve ice cream, but where the cream they’re using is 10% butterfat instead of the usual 5%. Combine that with a nice maple syrup for your flavoring, and the result is an excellent treat with a creamy sweetness that’s not too overpowering and a mouthfeel that’s better and richer than most soft-serves. If you’re ever in Vermont in the summer, I highly recommend snagging one from one of the random seasonal ice cream shops that pop up all over the state.

Love your music

Wil Wheaton had a nice post talking about music and discovering the full length album version of In A Gadda Da Vida (all 17 minutes of it) for the first time recently. I can’t share in that particular revelation, as I was already familiar with those epic organ and drum solos – Dad has/had the album and we definitely spent some time enjoying the “back catalog” over the years. Worth a listen if you haven’t, though!

It got me thinking a bit about this fantastic bit from Joe Pera Talks With You:

There’s something great about just earnestly loving a song, and letting yourself get swallowed by it for a while. Also, that even if you think everyone already knows a song or movie or book, there’s still so, so many people who’ve never heard of it before. I don’t watch reaction videos very often, but sometimes it really tickles me to watch reaction videos of someone hearing a song for the first time, when it actually hits them and they’re left saying “Wow, how did I miss this?”

On that note: some recent earworms to infect/enjoy:

Playlist above:

Quick Updates

I have a whole rant-y post that I’m not posting because I’m pretty sure y’all are already aware of how fucked things are right now and me venting my feelings on it won’t really help. So instead, a few quick site updates:

  • Updated the About page a little to catch it up on the fact I’ve moved back to Vermont and am now doing software development rather than technical writing.
  • Added another aphorism to Maynard’s Rules.
  • Updated the Walkabout gallery (now caught up to December 2023 😅).
  • Various server-side updates that should be invisible to y’all.

I’m still here.

Black Dragon rock formation in Utah. Dark red rocks in the midground, with a cloudy sky above and a desert landscape with desert brush in the foreground.